second of three!

2 September 2011

I’ve been at site for two weeks now and unfortunately don’t have access to internet in my ger yet. Not sure how much of a delay there will be between writing this and actually being able to post it aka when they tell me internet is up and running at the school. Ger life will be its own separate entry I’m sure, as well as an unfortunately recurring theme, but the past two days were my first two days in a Mongolian school and I thought I’d write about that instead. Okay? Okay.

There seems to be an information gap where the teachers only know some information and I get even less of it. Example: Monday at noon there was apparently a teachers’ meeting. My CP called me at 12:09 to tell me about it and by the time I got to the school it was already over. I started typing this during my lunch break and had no idea when afternoon classes actually started because when I asked my CP when I had to go back in she said she forgot to ask so she wasn’t sure. I had never quite realized the anal-ness of Americans, but it’s definitely there and this style of doing things is going to take awhile to get used to.

So first day of school. I show up around 8:30 after being told the ceremony thing was supposed to start at 8, but being there at 8:30 should be okay. There was some sitting around, I took on my usual persona of a lost puppy and was lost and confused, then people actually started doing things around 9. At 9:30 the talking and singing started and the ever popular announcement about the new American Peace Corps teacher came with an “oh no” from me and a request to go stand up front and wave to everyone. But oh no, not just wave, also got to give a nice little speech. I was told I could do it in English because everyone would think it’s “interesting” then my role was over. School starts on the same day for every secondary school in the country so we watched a program on tv for awhile (supposedly the President, but I think we got started too late and missed him) before leaving for lunch around 11. In the afternoon, there still weren’t classes; instead, the students had some sort of sport competitions outside that, honestly, I didn’t watch. I looked around for teachers I recognized before heading into the school to explore since I hadn’t gotten a chance to before. The training manager discovered me and whisked me back outside to watch children run around because at that point, that’s all they were really doing – semi-organized chaos. Then that was it. First day of school over. Not quite like any I had experienced stateside.

the school all done up the first day

That brings us to day two – the actual first day of classes. I’ve had better days. The information gap reached a whole new level because the schedule for classes wasn’t posted until that morning. I hadn’t even really been told what classes I was teaching, let alone which classes would happen the first day. I got to school a little before 8:30 because that was when the first hour starts and I didn’t want to be completely taken by surprise if I had a class then. Somehow it worked out that I don’t have classes in the mornings on Fridays so I sat around for a few hours and waited for the afternoon schedule to show up. It never did, but I was told that I had both 4^th and 5^th grades later. I went home for lunch and had the aforementioned confusion about when to go back. When I went back to school a little after 2 (complete guess as to when I should be there), I was surprised to find out that I hadn’t come back in time for my first class. I had asked the other teachers, but nobody knew anything. I was upset and a little angry, but I couldn’t exactly do anything about it. One teacher took pity on me and gave me the schedule of classes so I wouldn’t have this problem in the future. I also learned the hours of classes – it’s a very strange system. The first class that I actually taught went pretty well. I team taught with the teacher who helped me out with the schedule and she’s really nice. We didn’t lesson plan together since we didn’t know we were having class, but she told me her plan and it was fun. It was a 5^th grade class and at that age, students are both silly and decently hardworking. I’m able to embrace my inner child and they respond well. I have learned that it’s a really good thing to have a Mongolian teacher with me because she can tell them what we want them to do when I can’t get them to understand through minimal English or miming. I don’t know how I’m going to manage the classes when I’m solo teaching and don’t have someone else to rely on. I hope that when I actually receive the schedule for this quarter and get the format for classes, I can have some success.